The impact |
The dust cloud |
The flash |
Crash location |
Looking
at the big picture... |
Credit
line:
"Canada-France-Hawaii
Telescope / 2006"
~15s
before
impact
|
Credit
line:
"Canada-France-Hawaii
Telescope / 2006"
Impact!
|
Credit line: "Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope / 2006" ~15s after the impact... Nothing is visible anymore... |
|
This an animation showing the scene of the impact from the exposure just before the impact to ~130s later (~10 images). In order to look at the dust generated by the impact, the scene from before the impact has been substracted from all the images. Each image is a snapshot over 10s, with a gap of around 5s between exposure. The expansion of the dust cloud is clearly seen... No processing to enhance the signal and minimize the background noise has been made on these iamges. You can see the effect of some image processing when comparing with the mosaic or the animation on the left... |
This is an animation generated as on the left, but looking back in time for ~150s before the impact (a test to show how "uneventful" the scene was before the impact: it gives more confidence to the untrained eyes that indeed is indeed something happening after the impact!) |
Where did Smart-1
crash? To look at the location of the crash, we use two sets of data: - the position of the flash relative to a pair of reference craters visible as bright areas on the CFHT images, - a map of the Moon as seen from Mauna Kea at the time of the impact (thanks to the Moon Virtual Atlas). A simple triangulation allows to pinpoint the impact area within a couple of kilometers. The crash site determined from our observations is actually almost where the last predictions placed it a day before the impact |
Looking
at the big picture! In case you wonder what the Moon really looked like through WIRCam, you can watch the animation on the left. WIRCam has a BIG field (20' x 20', like 2/3rd of the Moon). WIRCam focal plane is an array of four detector, each of them 10'x10'. As the impact was on the South-East of the Moon, the South-East area of the Moon was placed on the North-West corner of the North-West detector... We ended up with only a tiny fraction of the whole field really used to look at the impact (see all the images above). What you see on the right is more or less the entire North-West detector. You can see the stars moving from one exposure to the next as the telescope tracks the Moon, and disappearing behind the Earthsine lit Moon crescent. The extreme upper right is saturated by the Sun as we start looking at the illuminated part of the Moon. You see, in the center area, ugly reflections coming from the bright Moon through various optics on the way down to the camera. WIRCam was definitely not designed to have such a big and bright light source close by! You also see the flash popping up on one of the frames in the upper right area. All the images shown above have been extracted form the large (2K x 2K single detector) images used for this wide angle animation. If you want a bigger version of the animation, click here. |
Smart-1 Mission web site at ESA
Bernard Foing (ESA SMART-1 project scientist) |